Hacker News: ryanchants

New comment by ryanchants in "Ask HN: What physical publication do you still buy?"

ryanchants — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 12:40:30 +0000

The New Atlantis, The New Criterion, The Hedgehog Review, and Garden & Gun. And then Stack magazine, and independent magazine subscription. They pick a different one from somewhere around the world and send it to you.

New comment by ryanchants in "Ask HN: Does a human still review your code?"

ryanchants — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:11:31 +0000

Increasingly not. We use CodeRabbit at work, which catches good stuff. And I have my own gauntlet that I run code through.

https://github.com/jacquardlabs/gauntlet

New comment by ryanchants in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

ryanchants — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 18:59:09 +0000

Working with agents generates a lot of markdown input and output. So I'm working on viva, a tool to help author and review docs.

You tell it what kind of doc you want, attach any necessary links/files/repo paths/etc, then it asks you clarifying questions until it has the data it needs. Then it authors a doc and give you a review interface. You can approve, request more info, request changes, make direct edits, etc. Then submit and makes edits until and represents until you approve all sections.

https://github.com/jacquardlabs/viva

New comment by ryanchants in "LearnVector – Andrew Ng's AI company building one‑to‑one learning experiences"

ryanchants — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 02:11:31 +0000

It's funny that AI even gave us similar themes.

New comment by ryanchants in "LearnVector – Andrew Ng's AI company building one‑to‑one learning experiences"

ryanchants — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 02:10:20 +0000

I'm working on a much smaller idea, but so far it's just me using it for grad school, and a friend using it for his master ciccerone prep. It has been really useful in the class I used it for while building it. Looking forward to playing with more as I start my fall semester(UIUC CS 425, Distributed Systems).

I need to get some model pricing evals in place to see if I can use open weight models to get it cheap enough, since it's just me and not VC money. The real product potential seems to be getting reusable materials like cert prep, continuing education for careers that require it, and the like. But then you're fighting incumbents that fiercely control their moats.

https://studyengine.app/

New comment by ryanchants in "Flux 3"

ryanchants — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:03:38 +0000

A lot of us spent substantial parts of our careers automating other folks out of jobs. But now that it's come for us, we're upset.

New comment by ryanchants in "Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k"

ryanchants — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 12:52:56 +0000

Yeah, my personal workflow has different reviewers for codebase(patterns, code cleanliness, etc), frontend, security, product fit, etc. So they spawn as separate subagents. Both so that they stay limited to their role, and so they don't have preconceived notions about the implementations. It's a bit heavy-handed but works for me.

New comment by ryanchants in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"

ryanchants — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 22:31:38 +0000

Still working on Study Engine and Nomnominees(more or less done for now).

StudyEngine is a webapp I'm using while doing my masters in comp sci. I upload lecture notes, textbooks, papers, etc. It then extracts topics and tracks my mastery of them over time. It uses an LLM to generate questions and flash cards. It loops in some newer learning science ideas. It tests recognition first(multiple choice), and then once a level of mastery is matched, it switches to recall. Working on adding RAG to it, so I can surface where in the source material something can be reviewed when going over quiz results. Currently just for me an some friends. If can get a good eval set up, I might work on optimizing cost and seeing if it could be opened up.

NomNominees is simple webapp that tracks James Beard, Great American Beer Festival, Festival of Barrel Aged Beers, and other awards. I use it when I'm traveling to find places to check out. Even just a cluster on a map shows me neighborhoods I might want to check out.

https://studyengine.app

https://www.nomnominees.com

New comment by ryanchants in "Ask HN: What cool stuff have you all been using Fable 5 for?"

ryanchants — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:00:44 +0000

Building a small webapp to live on my home server to manage my history/science/philosophy/general knowledge podcasts. And then have it connect to sonos to create my own talk radio. Scheduling to auto-play whenever I want, usually 8am M-F. Play a news podcast first thing in the morning, then defer to others.

Paired with that, a MacOS app that detects when I'm on a zoom or google meet call to auto-pause the sonos, then unpause when the call ends.

New comment by ryanchants in "DuckDB Internals: Why Is DuckDB Fast? (Part 1)"

ryanchants — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:52:39 +0000

Not who you responded to, but I've been working on cctx. It's an open source tool for analyzing claude code sessions to see where things went wrong(tool failure loops, bloated context, and the like).

https://github.com/jacquardlabs/cctx

New comment by ryanchants in "A greyscale iPhone setup that works in everyday life"

ryanchants — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 14:42:52 +0000

On a Pixel phone, you can do Accessibility -> Color Mode

New comment by ryanchants in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

ryanchants — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:32:57 +0000

I have a service that runs on my home server and uses the Ubiquiti API to detect when I'm on a zoom call. It then pauses my Sonos network-wide. Unpauses when the call is over. The next step of it is to have it's own podcast library, so I can have my own little talk radio going on in the background all day.

Some point, I want to convert into a little app and open source it, so you can install on your laptop so it's usable by more people. And have it detect more than just zoom.

New comment by ryanchants in "The Dating App Swipe Is Dying. What Comes Next May Be Worse"

ryanchants — Thu, 14 May 2026 13:22:13 +0000

They're recommender systems already, which is AI-powered, so how exactly are they changing?

New comment by ryanchants in "Nailing jelly to a wall: is it possible? (2005)"

ryanchants — Wed, 13 May 2026 19:34:44 +0000

When making a PB&J, I want just enough to jelly to add a little flavor to the peanut butter. Which is why my dad always called them "choke sandwiches" when I made them.

New comment by ryanchants in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

ryanchants — Wed, 13 May 2026 00:41:02 +0000

I've been working on something similar for helping work through my masters classes: https://studyengine.app

New comment by ryanchants in "Bankruptcies increase 11.9 percent"

ryanchants — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:00:32 +0000

> "Become a famous pop star or sports hero." - as improbable as ever.

It's even more improbable. For both of those, your starting to see more and more of the current generation that are children/nieces/nephews of the already famous. They have the financial comfort to pursue it, and the family connections in the industries.

And for sports, the level at which you have to be competitive is getting younger and younger. So much more sports science/nutrition going in at the middle school/high school level.

Those were two fields that seemingly were still meritocratic, but that is fading fast, if it ever existed at all.

New comment by ryanchants in "Tell HN: Do not include co-authored-by Claude in your commits"

ryanchants — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 02:09:05 +0000

You can just add the following to ~/.claude/settings.json

"alwaysThinkingEnabled": true, "includeCoAuthoredBy": false, "gitAttribution": false

New comment by ryanchants in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

ryanchants — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 19:41:49 +0000

An app for supplementing learning in my masters program [1]. I'm currently in enrolled in the MCS Online from UIUC. My first course, Natural Language Processing, has been interesting, but it's a coursera-based course. This means the lectures are pre-recorded and mostly just the professor reading the slides. It's hard for me to stay engaged and really learn the material. So I started with a series of claude prompts that took the lecture slides and created a pre-watch summary, and then helped me drill the concepts after each lecture. I think converted those into a platform where I can upload notes/lecture slides and have it generate quizzes. It starts with recognition(multiple choice) questions, and eventually moves to recall(short answer) once you prove mastery of a topic. It also generates flashcards from failed answers. It extracts topics from the uploaded materials, and tracks mastery over time. Mastery rots if you don't touch the platform/topic for a while.

I'm not sure if I'll every productize it in any way, but I could see a world where it's used by people prepping for the bar, med boards, various continuing education stuff. Right now it's just a fun platform to build on as I explore the current wave of technologies. Building a framework for evaluating different LLMs for best price/accuracy. Adding a RAG pipeline so wrong answers can point back to source material for further review, etc.

I'm looking at moving from backend engineering to a more MLE or agent pipeline role, so this is giving me something more than school projects to build on. While also helping me do better at school.

[1] https://studyengine.app/

New comment by ryanchants in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

ryanchants — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 23:47:52 +0000

I have it propose several approaches, pick and choose from each, and remove what I don't want done. "Use the general structure of A, but use the validation structure of D. Using a view translation layer is too much, just rely on FastAPI/SQLModel's implicit view conversion."

New comment by ryanchants in "Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?"

ryanchants — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 21:31:32 +0000

I had a lot of with Code Crafters. It's a paid platform, but they give you a basic walk through of different technologies, with full test suites. For example, you implement some basic Redis. It doesn't spoon feed you what to do, but breaks it down into manageable chunks.

https://codecrafters.io/